Department Colloquium

One of the classical problems in extremal set theory is to determine the size of the largest families of pairwise non-disjoint subsets in a given set. Erdös, Ko and Rado investigated this problem and classified the largest examples of these families. In the last decades, this problem, originated in set theory, was generalized to many other structures such as permutation groups, integer partitions, and projective spaces. In this presentation I will give an overview of the known Erdös-Ko-Rado theorems in set theory and projective geometry. In this last setting I will also give a classification result.